Can an artist simultaneously celebrate and critique pop culture? Those familiar with the incredibly varied work of Richard Prince have seen appropriation, pop culture, and cultural criticism battle it out over the span of his 30-year career. His medium of expression varies greatly, from recreating photography, paintings, reprints of comics, and even collecting clay auto-body molds. The duality of his work is evident in his 1980s photographic recreations of the Marlboro advertising campaign, which celebrates the iconic image of the cowboy and Western landscape, while drawing attention to the hypocrisy that such an image would be used to advertise an addictive, unhealthy vice. His Nurses, inspired by the covers of pulp-fiction hospital romance novel covers, are both alluring and unsettling. Also, regardless of where his aesthetic inspiration takes him, each series of work explores concepts of artistic ownership, as he recreates and sometimes simply reprints photography, imitating iconic corporate symbols, or reprinting text or quotes from writers. Prince forces the viewer to reconsider context, drawing attention to the irony of pop culture, while bringing what is normally left unsaid to the forefront. After Hours Preview Party features food, film screenings of Rendezvous and The Honeymoon Killers, a text-based art activity, and music by Skoal Kodiak for $35 from 9 p.m. to midnight Friday, March 21. — Jessica Armbruster

If there is one thing to be said about Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, it's that he was ambitious. He was a chemist and photographer who merged his passions by designing a camera and method to view black-and-white negatives in color. At the beginning of the 20th century, he took on an even greater challenge. He decided to photograph as much of his homeland as possible. This was no small project. At over 17 million square kilometers, Russia is the largest country in the world, almost twice as big as the U.S. and bigger than Antarctica. Prokudin-Gorskii carved the nation into 11 parts and took his plan to Tsar Nicolas II, who authorized it and gave Prokudin-Gorskii a specially equipped train with a darkroom for his journey. After years of photographing his fellow Russians and historical sites, his project finally ended in 1915. After he left Russia, the country was thrown into revolution, and his glass plate negatives were all that were left showing the country as it had been. In 1948 the Library of Congress bought the entire catalogue from Prokudin-Gorskii's estate, and the images were converted to color using a complicated process called digichoromatography. The resulting images are a rich display of a huge swath of the world just before it collapsed into chaos. — Ben Palosaari

After beating off late-season snowfall and threats of snow, spring has finally and mercifully honored us with its presence. At the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the season's being welcomed as it has for the past 24 springs with the 25th edition of Art in Bloom, a celebration of art and flowers. The four-day binge of all things beautiful and decadent is chock-full of tours, formal gourmet meals, wine tastings, demonstrations, and lectures given by the world's foremost experts on flowers and arrangements. Highlights include Thursday's lecture on Monet and impressionism by English photographer Derek Fell, and the museum-wide Flowers After Hours, a free party with a scavenger hunt, guided tours, and pub quiz with prizes. Friday features a French wine tasting and a lecture by Belgian-born flower designer and artist Nico De Swert, whose credits include work for Martha Stewart Living and O, the Oprah magazine. Be sure to check www.artsmia.org for a full schedule and registration forms for ticketed events, many are sure to sell out. — Ben Palosaari

Eugenics, the practice of changing the composition of a population through sterilization, or discouraging reproduction among people with "undesirable" traits and encouraging it among those with "desirable" traits, is an unsettling concept. But what "Deadly Medicine" shows about eugenics in Nazi Germany is downright terrifying. Organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the display demonstrates that eliminating non-Aryans or unwanted members of society from the German population was not and could not have been a solely military or government operation. It took the efforts and compliance of scientists, anthropologists, geneticists, and doctors to plan and execute a path toward eugenics, forced sterilization, and genocide. "Deadly Medicine" shows this tragedy of the rise of eugenics in Germany from before the Nazi regime to its peak through video of survivors, photographs, propaganda, and objects. Throughout the display's run, the Science Museum will host a lecture series with experts discussing the ideas "Deadly Medicine" presents. On April 10, Eva Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's harsh experiments on twins at Auschwitz, will speak about her process of forgiveness. — Ben Palosaari